AbeBooks book blog

J.G. Ballard’s home up for sale

Yet another home with literary significance has hit the open market. This time it’s the semi-detached Shepperton home of futurist and science fiction author J.G. Ballard.

Despite being a literary futurist, the house is quite dated and many folks visiting Ballard also found it quite hard to comprehend contrast between Ballard’s living conditions in sleepy Shepperton and the scenarios and characters found in his books.

In the house, he would write longhand between 10am and 1pm in his sitting room, producing around 1,000 words a day. He produced 18 novels in his career. In his later years, visitors to Mr Ballard’s house often remarked on how different it was to the apocalyptic scenes seen in his books. In a piece on Ballard in the The Atlantic in December 2009, Christopher Hitchens described Shepperton as “almost laughably tranquil”.

Of meeting Ballard at his home, Martin Amis wrote in 2009: “He told me that ‘Crash freaks’, from, say, the Sorbonne, would visit expecting to find a miasma of lysergic-acid and child abuse. In fact, what they found was a robustly rounded and amazingly cheerful suburbanite.”